Month: February 2012

North Korea has agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, as well as nuclear and long-range missile tests, following talks with the US.

The US State Department said Pyongyang had also agreed to allow UN inspectors to monitor its reactor in Yongbyon to verify compliance with the measures.

In return, the US is finalising 240,000 tonnes of food aid for the North.

The move comes two months after Kim Jong-un came to power following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il.

Correspondents say the move could pave the way for the resumption of six-party disarmament negotiations with Pyongyang, which last broke down in 2009.

Both the DPRK [North Korea] and the US affirmed that it is in mutual interest to… push ahead with the denuclearisation through dialogue and negotiations”

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US still had “profound concerns” over North Korea, but welcomed the move as a “first step”.

“On the occasion of Kim Jong-il’s death, I said that it is our hope that the new leadership will choose to guide their nation onto the path of peace by living up to its obligations.

“Today’s announcement represents a modest first step in the right direction.”

North Korea confirmed the move in a foreign ministry statement released in Pyongyang.

The statement, carried by the KCNA news agency, said the measures were “aimed at building confidence for the improvement of relations” between the two countries, and said talks would continue.

“Both the DPRK [North Korea] and the US affirmed that it is in mutual interest to ensure peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, improve the relations between the DPRK and the US, and push ahead with the denuclearisation through dialogue and negotiations,” it said.

She is there whenever I go the shops. Every time I think she can’t get any more skeletal, she manages it. Wild eyes staring in different directions, she must have been pretty once. I try not to look, for she is often aggressive. Sometimes, though, she is in my face and asking me to go into the shop, from which she has been banned, to buy her something. A scratchcard. She feels lucky. “Maybe some food?” I suggest pointlessly, but food is not what she craves. Food is not crack. Or luck. She has already lost every lottery going.

An addict is the author of their own misfortune. Her poverty is self-inflicted. All these hopeless people: where do they all come from? It is, of course, possible never to really see them, as their distress is so distressing. Who needs it? Poverty, we are often told, is not “actual”, because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?

Meanwhile, in the US, as this week’s shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flipside of the American dream. Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America’s wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscapes is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheerlead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.

This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead’s life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.

Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the pre-conditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional pre-condition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn’t starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn’t properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn’t all this the fault of the countries they live in?

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labour, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely “trickled down” from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.

The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.

While the Presidential election is still 9 months away, it’s already apparent to a lot of Republicans that their party is in such disarray that it is unlikely they will be able to launch a serious challenge to the reelection of Barack Obama. Let the blame-game begin.

In a brilliant column in today’s New York Times entitled, The Possum Republicans, David Brooks decries all the “mainstream” centrist Republicans like Sen. Richard Lugar (R. Indiana) who have surrendered their own principled convictions to please tea-party Republicans on the right whom he calls the ‘wingers.’

The result of all this pandering is that a political party that had traditionally been identified with national security, pro-business policies and keeping government lean and mean, is now seen by many Americans as disorganized circus starring a lot of frightening clowns. Many moderate Republicans like Lugar and Romney, have so capitulated their moderate positions on healthcare and reproductive rights to win the loyalty of the angriest, most insane elements of the Republican base, it is now impossible to identify what the party stands for and who are its leaders.

Brooks is all too aware of the damage done:

All across the nation, there are mainstream Republicans lamenting how the party has grown more and more insular, more and more rigid. This year, they have an excellent chance to defeat President Obama, yet the wingers have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.

Brooks accurately gauges the capacity of the “wingers” to participate in the democratic process:

“They have zero tolerance for the compromises needed to get legislation passed. They don’t believe in trimming and coalition building. For them, politics is more about earning respect and making a statement than it is about enacting legislation. It’s grievance politics, identity politics.”

The result? A wishy-washy centrist like Romney who has changed his mind so many times on so many issues that neither independent voters or the “wingers” trust him. Can he really be the Republican standard-bearer? The old-guard knows that Santorum and Gingrich are losing propositions but the base is still hoping for an alternative.

And who would believe that just 5 years after being forced out of the U.S. Senate because of his bombastic brand of social conservatism, many Americans are today pondering the very real possibility of Rick Santorum becoming the Republican nominee? Even if Santorum doesn’t get the nomination, the damage is done: The wingers and the wish-washy centrists have turned the Republican Party into a joke.

Mitt Romney dodged campaign disaster last night, pulling off a 3-point win over Rick Santorum in his home state of Michigan, while splitting the state’s delegates.

AP Photo (2)

But the real question is why the race was so close—and that says as much about the current state of the GOP as it does about Mitt’s uninspiring campaign.

Keep in mind that Mitt won Michigan by 9 points in 2008, defeating the state’s winner in 2000, John McCain. Romney was then the conservatives’ favorite candidate in the race, inspiring hosannas from church leaders and the talk radio crowd. He won “very conservative” voters overwhelmingly last time around, but he lost those voters last night to Rick Santorum, along with strong supporters of the Tea Party, blue-collar workers and evangelicals—in other words, his party’s populist base.

Questions about Mitt’s commitment to conservative principles are nothing new—he had already done a 180 on virtually every social issue in 2008. What’s changed is the elevation of hyperpartisan polarization within the Republican Party.

…

Republicans are learning that some of the conservative populist forces they encouraged to angrily shout down President Obama cannot be appeased without absolutism. You reap what you sow. In this extreme ideological cage match, removed from the majority of the American people, the GOP is left bloodied, bruised, and unenthused. The stakes right now feel like less about actually winning the White House than fighting to avoid general-election suicide.

What’s Olympia Snowe up to? Her surprise decision to retire from the Senate came with what Jonathan Chait at New York magazine sees as an “unusually specific” statement about her desire to try to fix DC’s partisan ways. “I intend to help give voice to my fellow citizens who believe, as I do, that we must return to an era of civility in government driven by a common purpose to fulfill the promise that is unique to America,” she said.

To Chait, that sounds an awful lot like the stated intent of Americans Elect, a group trying to put together a third-party ticket for the presidency. And, hmmm, former Democratic Sen. David Boren also got behind Americans Elect yesterday. “Snowe and Boren would make for the kind of ticket Americans Elect is looking for,” writes Chait. “Is that the plan?”

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Dissolve the Union!

Quote Unquote – Democrats

"No one expects you to take a vow of poverty. But I will say it betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do."

- President Obama, 2013 Morehouse College commencement address.

"'We're all in this together' is a much better philosophy than 'you're on you're own.'"
- President Clinton

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."
- John F. Kennedy

“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith, but in doubt.“
- Reinhold Niebuhr

Quote Unquote – Republicans

"There's nothing in this for conservatives. Not even a bright or shiny object. I don't know how you negotiate up from this capitulation. I think the long faces are a result of the realization, if not the vocalization yet, that this sets the precedent for this Congress."

-- Rep. Tom Massie (R-KY), 17 October 2013

"Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That's just not going to fly."
- Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE), October 2013